60 Minute Review of…

Master of Orion 3

The combat in the original MOOs was a neat little tactical subgame
where you moved your colorfully drawn ships one turn at a time and
watched them in action. You clearly saw the effect of the different
weapons. You could tell how ships with strong shields fared against
certain weapons, how missiles could reach out and touch someone
at the other end of the screen, and how a swarm of fighters could
overwhelm bigger and more advanced ships.

But in MOO3, once you get past how absolutely awful the graphics
are, you'll be surprised at how little information is presented,
how little input is needed from you, and how the whole thing feels
like a formality. The voxel graphics for the ships look terrible,
especially when you zoom in close. There's no clear indication of
which ships are which designs, so you won't know one weapon from
another. You can't see enemy ship designs, so you have no idea what
you're shooting at or what's shooting back at you. There's no sense
of which ships are maneuverable and fast or which ships are slow
behemoths with massive firepower. You're just staring at a grid
with tiny dots on it, with no role other than to give some of them
movement orders while everything plods on in real time and since
there's really not much for you to do, you can't help but notice
how a detachment of super advanced space fighters is presented as
nothing more than a swarm of gnats. The dots make plinky laser sounds,
a few colored lines flash onscreen, some numbers float up, and some
of the dots die. It's absurdly uninformative and unattractive. Did
they mean to include this part?

Reinforcing the idea that your ship designs are disposable is the
new "five X" victory condition. Master of Orion 3 has
some silly backstory about discovering five Xs, which means sending
some of your ships out of the game for a while, where they park
in a penalty box/limbo screen and occasionally die. Eventually,
some of them might find something called an X, which gives your
AI viceroys some empire wide bonus that they probably really enjoy.
Get five of these and you'll win the game. Like so much of MOO3,
you have no direct role in any of this. You just sit back and press
the 'turn' button while it happens.

At least they fleshed out the ground combat. It's chock full of
detail, although your only job is to take a stab in the dark and
guess which formation is best for your men and wonder why you ever
wouldn't check the biological weapons box. No, there's no information
to help you. There's plenty of information about your men, including
the terrain in which they fight best. So you're sitting there watching
the numbers tick down, listening to occasional sound bites that
report on the progress of the battle, thinking 'okay, I guess this
is pretty nifty'. Then you notice there's no information available
on where you're fighting. And because you're really just a spectator
here, you're wondering why MOO3 tells you what terrain your men
like most, but neglects to tell you what terrain they're actually
fighting on. Okay, battle's over. Time to go hit the 'turn' button
a few more times.